JCR 2010 data are now available

The 2010 Journal Citation Reports data were released today, June 28. This first JCR was published as volume 9 of the 1975 Science Citation Index™ (back then, the SCI was only 8 volumes!). All the familiar features of the JCR are present for the 36th time – Journal Impact Factors, the citing-cited journal networks, total citations, cited half-life. After all this time, what could be new?

New data: The JCR, as most users know, analyzes one year of citation data from the Thomson Reuters citation indexes. Each year is a new year of data, that represent citations that will be part of no prior (or future) JCR data. Though simple, this fact is often overlooked. The 2010 JCR began with a dataset of 49 million cited references indexed by Thomson Reuters from any of over 20,000 sources in science, social sciences, arts & humanities, book and journal proceedings volumes. The result is new data for the 10,196 titles in the JCR (8005 in the Sciences edition, 2678 in the Social Sciences edition – 487 titles are listed in both editions).

New Categories: Two new categories will appear in the 2010 JCR – one in the Science Edition, one in the Social Sciences edition. Categories are created by the Editorial Development specialists when a topic is sufficiently cohesive from a citation standpoint, and has a robust collection of dedicated journals in our products.

Science: Primary Health Care

This is not exactly a new topic – and most of the journals in the category have been covered for many years. Internal review of our collection, as well as discussion with the community identified Primary Care (or Family Medicine) as a medical specialty that had a mature set of journals which were related to general medicine, internal medicine and various aspects of health services, but were also a distinct and interrelated set. View the description of the Primary Health Care category here.

Social Sciences: Cultural Studies

This category has allowed to collect and compare journals from a variety of social science areas that allow an interdisciplinary view of culture. Many of the journals for the Cultural Studies category have been added to Thomson Reuters this year (2011), and will not appear in the JCR until next year. View the description of the Cultural Studies category here.

New Journals: 1075 titles will receive their first Journal Impact Factor in 2010 data (view the list here). This large number is the result of two recent initiatives at Thomson Reuters.

1) The expansion of coverage to align to the increasingly global population of users of Web of Science™ (read more here). Many of the journals identified through this project were added to coverage with their 2008 issues; in 2010, we now have a complete three years of source materials – enough to publish an accurate Journal Impact Factor.

2) When journals were added to coverage in 2010, our indexing didn’t start with the 2010; we included 2009 and 2008 as well. In fact, we indexed as far back as 2006 if that would allow us to obtain the first volume. This allows us to publish a Journal Impact Factor for most journals within a year of their selection for Web of Science.

The 2010 JCR is the largest data set we’ve ever published, containing 10,196 titles (view the list here) – with multiple metrics and a rich descriptive data set prepared for each journal, and for each category.

New and Old: The JCR isn't just new, it’s also old. It has an unrivalled history and reputation based on 35 years of consistent publication, experience, study, and review of our content, processes and policies. To see the "all new" JCR 2010, go to Web of Knowledge (www.webofknowledge.com).

Precise time of your access wil vary a bit, since we have a large number of servers to update and a large number of customers to activate. All servers and customers should be live by 1:30 PM, EDT (GMT-5).

See comment just above yours: JCR is available to all subscribers on Web of Knowledge. Go to: www.isiknowledge.com (orwww.webofknowledge.com) . You should see a tab for "Additional Resources" - the link to JCR is top of the list.

If your organization has a subscription to JCR - that's where you'll find it.

At the time of JCR extraction and the preparation of the data, we were missing a year 2009 issue. This left the denominator of the 2010 Journal Impact Factor incomplete, preventing our completing the calculation accurately. The publisher has provided the missing content, and indexing is now complete and the journal will appear in the September reload of JCR data. In the interim, the now-correct and now-complete data will be listed in the JCR Notices file within the next few days.

The Notices file is updated weekly from the release of JCR through the September reload.

Many journals do not receive impact factors. Suppose that jouranl A does receive an impact factor, and suppose that jouranl B does not. If an article in B cites an article in A, is this citation (from an unrated journal) included in calculating the impact factor of A?

When we talk about data, the devil is in the details! So I want to make sure I'm clear in how I am interpreting your question.

For the preparation of the year 2010 JCR, all cited references are extracted from any journal or proceedings volume with publication year 2010 that was indexed for Web of Science (Science Citation Index-Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index or Conference Proceedings Citation Index). It doesn't matter if the journal or proceedings itself appears in the JCR at all - just that it was indexed for our products.

So, if Journal B is indexed for Web of Science and it cited Journal A, that cited reference is part of the Total Citations for Journal A. If Journal B cited year 2008 or 2009 in Journal A, then that cited reference will be part of the Journal Impact Factor numerator.

If we do NOT index Journal B - then we have no record of what materials were cited by Journal B. Our metrics are based on the content we have selected and indexed, because we believe that the journals that are most likely to influence their field are also most reliable as a source of "recommendations" of other titles. The data indexing from our content is then based on many layers of verification and comparison with over 500,000,000 unique cited references and 50,000,000 indexed source items. We invest a lot of time in the journals we index.

Please, can you tell us how are defined the journal subject categories ? Do the editors choose the categories where their journals have to be ranked ? Are the categories defined by statistics on key-words of articles ? Other ? (for instance, we can see that the subject categories of some journals expand from a year to another)

@f-mr: The subject specialist(s) in Editorial Development assign journals to categories. JCR and Web of Science use these assignments for display in product. Many criteria are considered during the selection of subject categories for a journal. The first consideration is the subject matter and scope of the journal, which is compared to the scope notes of our categories. We also look at author and editorial board affiliations, what funding agencies are providing grant-support, and cited references as well as citing and cited reference relationships. Other considerations include a journal’s sponsor (“Official Journal of the Association of…..) and a journal’s categorization in other bibliographic databases.

Could you please advise on the following matter. Why is it that a prestigious journal like IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials does not appear in the list of indexed journals released by Thomson Reuters. Note that the said journal does appear in the notices section of the released report. Thank you in advance for your reply.

The title is a book series - annually publishing proceedings papers. I am not sure why this is not appearing in the Master Journal List. It may have something to do with the rules for generating the list from our production system. I will forward your question to the Bibliographic Control group (TS.AGBibliographicControl@thomsonreuters.com) - I can post more information hear when I have details.

SNIP is an interesting metric - it "normalizes" impact according to several parameters that can be characteristic of a field: the number of cited references per article in that subject, the degree to which the database covers that subject compared to other subjects - and others. The goal, I believe, was to make all fields look alike - that their SNIP values would not show the kind of variation that Journal Impact Factors show between fields.

Since I'm a long-time user of the JCR, I find that there is information embedded in the differences between the top Journal Impact Factors from category to category.

There are many metrics available - the question is, what do you really want to measure, and do you really understand what it is telling you?

Then we can not compare an absolute value with some normalised value when the base values themselves differ

I find PROC WRLD ACAD SCI E to be a journal added as

Proceedings of World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology ISSN 20703740 2009-ongoing

SNIP 0.126 - Not Open Access - Added as a journal of World Academy of Science Engineering and Technology France under Physical Sciences Engineering

CWTS Journal Indicator gives 2010 & 2011 metrics and is found in Web of Science too without volume number.

( The recent issue is Volume 79 JULY 2011 ). This is the reason why I searched in Master Journal List.

Does it mean that the JCR data will be available in future for this journal? Say after the data required to calculate the Impact Factor is available and then be added to the list?

I am under the impression that if a journal A is used for the calculation of Impact Factor of Journal B , Then impact factor of journal A is also calculated or is added to the list first and then is calculated . Is it not True?

Or is it true that only those journals which are found in the Master journal list at present are considered for calculation of JCR data and not all those found in web of science?

We have covered Proceedings of World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology for many years - and basic metrics on the journal can be generated in Web of Science "Analyze Results" feature, but we will not be publishing a Journal Impact Factor for the title.

With 'Create Citation Report' link for 'PROC WRLD ACAD SCI E' I got citation report for the journal as Average

Citations per Item [?] : 0.24

This is ofcourse slightly different from JIF and also I could find that there are articles missing. This would make the JCR calculations either approximate or even misleading in some cases where the number of articles in a year is less and citations in general is also less.

Since This report reflects citations to source items indexed within Web of Science, it should be affecting the Impact Factor/JCR of other journals too. Excluding as many journals as possible in web of science is also not going to make JCR data reflect true impact of an article or source.

The actual citations per item, if missing articles are included, may be less due to increase in denominator of this journal.

Due to reduction in the numerator of other journals, the IF/ citations per item of those journals would also be less due to citations in missing articles not getting included during the JCR calculation.

Is it not possible to make the author/publisher of a web of science product to include their articles as and when they find them to be missing with a suitable interface so that it may be verified and approved later by the people of TR - web of science?

Titles and articles, which are poorly cited in general or with reduced number of articles per year, get affected

drastically due to even one or two missing articles with considerable number of citations.

If it is true, then It would be strange that a journal which misses article gets advantage and other journals get affected due to missing article in that journal.

I feel that such errors become negligible if the number of articles are large and all articles and citations in web of science included with steady inclusion of sources in web of science.

What should an author/ any reader do if he finds that his/someone else's article is missing?

Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research is not indexed by Thomson Reuters.

Only journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and/or the Social Sciences Citation Index are eligible for inclusion in the Journal Citation Reports and the publication of a Journal Impact Factor.

My question is related to the missing information about the journal American Mathematical Monthly, ISSN 0002-9890, from the latest JCR file. I mention that in the older versions of JCR, the information about this journal appears and that the journal is listed in the Master Journal List, so information about it should appear.

JCR will only list titles when complete data are available for the calculation of an accurate Journal Impact Factor. When the JCR data were prepared, we were missing one issueof American Mathematical Monthly from volume 116, 2009. Therefore, the Journal Impact Factor denominator was incomplete and the resulting metric would be falsely inflated.

We actively claimed the missing issue from the publisher, but we have not, to this date, received the materials.